Connor O’Toole was tall, his hair a dark chestnut-brown. Jason was shorter, and had black hair and a goatee. Madeline stood between them, watching as Ruby missed an easy shot.
When it was the opponents’ turn, Ruby slipped around behind Madeline and quietly said, “I’ll keep an eye on the door for you. So far I don’t see him.”
Madeline spun around. Was she that transparent?
Evidently she was, for the striking redhead winked at her. “I take it Riley will be joining you?”
Madeline blinked in surprise. He’d gone to his house to let the dog out. She expected him back any minute. “How did you know?”
“Girlfriend, those are stars in your eyes.”
Before Madeline could dispute it, she heard a stir at the front of the room. She turned around, fully expecting to see Riley. Instead a tall, muscular man with a nearly shaved head stood at the end of the bar.
Ruby’s mouth fell open the way Madeline’s often did. The song on the jukebox ended. Somebody turned down the volume on the TV. Through the ensuing silence, the young bartender said, “Trust me, pal, you don’t want to be here.”
“Hey, Ruby,” the man said.
The color drained out of Ruby’s face. “What are you doing here, Peter?” she asked, walking toward him.
Peter? As in Cheater Peter? Madeline thought. Uh-oh.
“Sully’s is mine,” Ruby said. “You get The Alibi. Fitting, isn’t it?”
The man looked around as if gauging the crowd. He had the physique of a body builder and towered over the other men in the room. “Aw, Rube. How many times can I say I’m sorry? How many ways?”
“I want you to leave.” Ruby sounded miserable.
“I can’t eat. I can’t sleep,” he said huskily. “You’re all I can think about.”
“You weren’t thinking about me when you were with that tramp Desiree.”
Somewhere a woman said, “Good one, Ruby.”
And a man said, “Did she say Desiree?”
Peter had the sense to grimace. “I’m sorry. I mean it, Ruby. I am. I swear, it’ll never happen again.”
“If you don’t get out of my sight, I swear, I’ll find Garret’s olive fork behind the bar and—”
“All right, I’m going, but I love you and I’m not giving up.” He cast one last beseeching look at her then walked out, closing the door just short of a slam.
In the ensuing silence, Riley walked in.
He stood for a moment in that stance Madeline had come to associate with him alone, shoulders straight, hands on his hips, feet apart. While everyone was still watching, his gaze found hers.
Madeline’s heartbeat quickened. How could she feel such joy upon seeing him when she’d only known him for two days, when she was still aching for Aaron, when she had no business feeling this way?
Beside her Jason Horning said, “She’ll probably take the jerk back.” He was talking to Connor, but looking at Ruby.
Suddenly Madeline remembered why his name sounded familiar. This was the man who would walk across hot coals for Ruby. Ruby’s brother, Connor, was looking at Sissy the same way. Sissy glanced at the young bartender, who suddenly developed a keen interest in the baseball game on TV.
Madeline wondered about the elements at work here. Jason wanted Ruby. Ruby didn’t know what she wanted. Ruby’s brother, Connor, was interested in Sissy. Apparently Sissy had unfinished business with the young bartender.
And what about her and Riley? she thought.
As if in answer, he strode directly to her and kissed her cheek. The touch of his lips on her skin felt like one of those childhood wishes to go back and do something over, only better, because she knew something now that she hadn’t known then.
“Hey, Riley,” one of the men at the bar said. “Was that your poster I saw on the light pole on the corner?”
Riley barely spared a glance at the man.
Madeline was mesmerized by the warmth in his gaze. Scientists around the world were theorizing that something profound was taking place in the stratosphere. It was affecting rain forests and the oceans’ tides, weather patterns and the effects of the sun. Whatever was happening, it surpassed the physical and was affecting behaviors and relationships everywhere on the globe.
The people in this small bar could have attested to that.
“If nobody claims him, you should name him Midas,” the man who’d brought it up stated, obviously oblivious to the undercurrents swirling among half the people in the room.
“I think he looks like a Chief,” someone else said.
“Duke.”
“Mr. Howl.”
“Mr. Howl? Please. He’s a Sarge if I ever saw one.”
Madeline and Riley stood a foot apart, connected by a force as powerful as nature itself, in harmony no matter what the orbiting moon had to do with it. “Comet,” she said.
She was thinking about shooting stars.
“Didn’t I tell you the new veterinarian would ask you out, Summer?” Madeline looked out the window as she shifted the cell phone against her ear.
It was one of those ink-black nights that made the stars seem like tiny pinpricks in black velvet. The moon was a narrow sliver, and the mercury lights dotting the shore were surrounded by soft blue halos.
“His name is Jake Nichols,” Summer said as if bored with the topic.
Summer Matthews dated now and then, but she always kept things light. Madeline was one of the few people who knew why.
“I’d be willing to bet your date tonight was far more eventful than mine,” Summer said.
Startled out of her reverie, Madeline watched the yellow lights of a ship glide by. “I didn’t have a date tonight.”
“Uh-huh. Has Riley named his dog yet?”
“He still won’t admit it’s his dog.”
Settling on one end of the sofa in the small cottage, Madeline curled her legs underneath her. In a chatty mood, she recounted the story of how Riley had put up posters around town. She told Summer about Fiona, too, and Ruby and Cheater Peter and the waitress, Sissy, and the bartender—Madeline couldn’t remember his name—and everything that had happened at Sully’s Pub while she was waiting for her pizza to bake.
“Was Riley there, too?” Summer asked.
Madeline nodded even though Summer couldn’t see.
She and Riley hadn’t stayed at Sully’s long. They’d picked up the pizza when it was ready, and ate it in his car in her driveway like a couple of teenagers on a Friday night.
“He hired a truck and movers to cart out all the furniture he’s finally taken a look at and doesn’t like. They start tomorrow.”
“But you’re not seeing him,” Summer said.
“There’s seeing someone and there’s seeing someone,” Madeline explained.
“Did he pick you up tonight?”
“I drove his Porsche.”
“A Porsche, really?” And then, “Did he bring you home?”
“He lives right next door.”
“Did he kiss you good-night?”
Madeline’s fingertips went to her lips. He’d kissed her in the front seat of his car with the pizza box between them, on the sidewalk beneath the slivered moon and at her door in the shadow of the cottage. She should have been weak in the knees, and yet she felt stronger than she had in a very long time.
She sighed over the phone.
“That’s what I thought,” Summer said affectionately. “You’re seeing Riley Merrick, all right.”
Madeline sighed again, because Summer didn’t know the half of it. If she wasn’t careful, she could fall in love with him.
Madeline raised her fist to knock on Riley’s door.
Noticing it shaking, she wrapped her other hand around it and looked around. It was the kind of balmy spring night Midwesterners waited all winter for, the kind that said, “There, see? Doesn’t spring always come?”
For Madeline, it had been a long, sunless winter. Eighteen months, one week, and two days long to be exact. In so
me ways she felt like a coma patient, stiff from laying for so long, not quite certain how to start living again, but ready to feel the grass beneath her feet and the sun in her hair.
After her phone conversation with Summer, she’d stood for a long time in the shower. She’d lathered the cigarette smoke from Sully’s out of her hair and scrubbed every inch of her skin. The sense that she needed to tell Riley the truth about his heart didn’t wash away with hot water.
She wanted to tell him.
She had to tell him.
Her conviction grew stronger as she dried her hair. It followed her to the closet as she decided what to wear.
It was ten o’clock. Hoping it wasn’t too late for an unannounced visitor, she knocked, surprised when the door opened an inch, and then two.
She poked her head inside. “Riley?”
The light was on in the kitchen and the dog was sprawled out on his pillow on the other side of the room. He opened one eye. Seeing it was only her, he closed it again and commenced to snore.
“Some watchdog you are,” she said affectionately, and then, a little louder, “Hello? Anybody home?”
Riley’s car was in the driveway, lights were on all through the house, and the door was unlocked. Surely he was here somewhere.
She tried the dining room next. Blueprints were spread across the table she’d uncovered earlier that afternoon and a chair was pulled out, as if he’d been sitting in it and had only just now gotten up.
“Riley?”
She continued on into the living room where the orange-and-green sofa looked so glaringly out of place even amidst all the clutter. Although there was still no sign of Riley, she could hear a television. The only TV she’d seen had been on the wall in the master bedroom.
And she wasn’t going in there.
“Riley?” she called from the doorway that led down the hall. From here she could see the prescription bottles lined up neatly on the counter in the bathroom. Inside were the pills he took to keep from rejecting his new heart.
Her own heart thudded. For the first time since Aaron’s accident, she felt as if something beautiful truly had come from something wrenchingly tragic.
“Riley?” Two of the doorways were dark, but light spilled from the master bedroom at the end of the narrow hall.
She’d gone as far as she could go and was turning around to leave when she heard something. It sounded like the quiet thud of a door, followed by footsteps.
She saw Riley a heartbeat before he saw her. He stood at the end of the hallway wearing nothing but a towel. Fresh from a shower, his hair looked almost black. Water droplets clung to his chest, glistening white on the long scar down its center.
As he stood there looking back at her, his towel slowly slid from his hips. He stepped over it, the action drawing her eyes lower. Not that she could have kept her gaze from going there.
“I was just thinking about you,” he said without an ounce of self-consciousness. “Who says wishes don’t come true.”
He held out his hand, bidding her to come closer.
Feeling her face flame and her mouth go slack, she spun around and did the only rational thing she could think to do. She ran, past the orange-and-green sofa, past the dining room table and the sleeping dog. She ran, out the door, across the lawn and through the gap in the arborvitae hedge.
But she didn’t outrun the memory of Riley Merrick, fully aroused.
Riley found Madeline sitting in the dark in an old Adirondack chair behind the cottage. He’d thrown on some clothes before walking over, but as far as he knew, she hadn’t looked at him. Since he hadn’t tried to be quiet, she had to have heard him approach. He didn’t ask if he could sit down. Instead, he stopped directly in front of her chair.
“I’m a little surprised to see you so soon,” she said.
Her hands went to either side of her face. The narrow sliver of moonlight was too weak to reach all the way to the earth’s surface, therefore he couldn’t actually see the blush on her cheeks. He smiled because she was so adorably innocent. “It isn’t as if you’ve never seen a naked man.”
She turned her head in surprise. And it dawned on him that she was awfully innocent for a modern woman, for any modern woman, but especially for a woman who’d been engaged.
“Madeline?” he said, taking her hand.
She looked up at him looking down at her. She remained seated and he continued to hold her hand, his thumb drawing half circles on her cool skin.
“I’ve never. Um. That is, I was saving, er, it, for my wedding night.”
He was pretty sure he’d known a virgin or two in his lifetime. He was positive he’d never taken one to bed. He would have known, and he would have remembered.
She held perfectly still, as if waiting to see what he would do with her admission.
“The only thing this changes,” he said, his voice husky in his own ears, “is the way I’ll make love to you the first time.”
Madeline felt herself being drawn to her feet. And then Riley was framing her face with both his hands, sliding his fingers over her cheekbones, over the delicate curves of her ears. Even in the black pearl darkness she could see the possessive gleam in his eyes.
She raised a palm to his cheek. With one fingertip she touched the groove beside his mouth then slowly glided her fingernail over his lips. She knew an enormous power when the groove deepened, when he moaned into her hand.
He slipped his fingers into her hair, anchoring her face for his kiss. At the onset, the touch of his mouth on hers felt like a solemn promise to protect her, to hold what was dear. Her eyes fluttered closed, and his passion rose.
Her answering response shouldn’t have been shocking, but a shock ran through her nonetheless. She backed up so quickly and with so much vehemence the backs of her legs bumped the edge of the chair.
She could tell it cost him to let her go.
“I’ll never pressure you, Madeline,” he said. And she knew it was another promise. “I’ll leave the door unlocked. The light will be on when you’re ready. I’ll be waiting.”
She lost sight of him in the darkness and had to rely on sound to chart his progress across the narrow yard and through the gap in the arborvitae hedge. She must have imagined the click of his back door opening and closing, for the house was too far away to hear that, but in her mind’s eye she saw him standing in his kitchen.
She looked out across the water then up at the dark sky before opening the cottage’s back door. She went in, then stood leaning against the door, her heart beating and her mind reeling. Panicking, she took a step in one direction, then another, only to stop each time.
She was unable to flee, unable to even pace. All she could do was stand in the quiet in the dark, her breathing deep and shallow by turns. Her bra felt restrictive suddenly, her skirt heavy on her hips.
Her body knew exactly what she wanted.
She wanted Riley’s hands on her skin. She wanted it so badly she half expected to be able to beam herself there with a blink of her eye.
Oh, that life could be that easy.
After Aaron died, she hadn’t been able to take pleasure in anything without feeling guilty. There wasn’t even joy in the simple things like eating and sleeping and working. She’d been enjoying nearly every moment since she’d set foot in Gale. Although it made her ache, it was more like the feeling she had while watching the horizon swell into sunrise, as if the human body had no capacity to process such incredible beauty.
He said he would leave the door open and the light on. He’d said he would be waiting.
The next step was up to her. If she dared.
Chapter Seven
Riley was at the sink when he heard a sound at his back door. Madeline walked in, the bravest woman he’d ever known, and stood taking him in. The long sleeves of her shirt were pushed up, the result of a bout of nerves, most likely. The top two buttons were open, allowing him a glimpse of skin he was going to take his time exploring. Her skirt skimmed her body like a
whisper. It was casual, sexy as hell.
“You’re taking a chance leaving your door unlocked that way you know,” she said. “Anybody could have gotten in.”
“I didn’t leave it unlocked for just anyone.”
There went the pit of Madeline’s stomach again. She didn’t know how Riley could be so calm when she was a bundle of nerves. She didn’t think she’d ever seen a more appealing man than him standing at a sink full of dishes, his feet bare, a towel slung over one shoulder, his shirt hanging open to reveal his washboard stomach and a little higher, his scar.
Men and women were so different, even when it came to sex. And no matter how she sugarcoated this, that’s what this was.
She’d taken the shortcut through the gap in the arborvitae hedge, knowing full well that every step brought her closer to Riley and her first time. She couldn’t believe she was really here. She only knew that if she hadn’t come over, she would have regretted it for the rest of her life.
He put down the dish he’d been drying and dropped the towel on top of it. When he took a step toward her, she took a step, too. They met in the middle of the room, her heart pounding as if she’d been running.
“I wasn’t sure you’d come,” he said.
She considered the dimmed lights and the soft music and his unbuttoned shirt, and said, “You look pretty sure to me.”
“Let’s just say I was hoping.” His smile did something to the pit of her stomach.
She knew what was on his mind. It was in the way he moved, all animal prowess and masculine intent. It was in his scent, a hint of aftershave and something that was uniquely him. It was in the way he twined his fingers with hers. He wasn’t rushing her; his patience enveloped her in warmth. For the first time in a long time there were no shadows across her heart. He was giving her time, and it was such a gift, this shared moment.
As he started toward the dining room, she went with him, her steps matching his. She was only vaguely aware of the rooms as they passed, for suddenly they were in his bedroom. His arms came around her, drawing her against the hard length of him. His breathing deepened. Hers hitched.
The Wedding Gift Page 8